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Assessment of Academic Programs

Purpose

Guided by the value of "Academic Excellence in a Personal Environment" and a guiding principle from its current strategic plan of delivering "Academic Programs Balancing Liberal Arts with Professional Preparation," the University of West Georgia is committed to improving student learning. One method of implementing this is through the assessment of student learning outcomes in academic programs, including the core curriculum.

The purposes of assessing student learning outcomes are:

To improve student learning, and

To maintain compliance with SACSCOC Accrediation Standards and USG Board of Regents Policy

Process

Each student learning outcome in each academic program, at each location the program is offered, should be assessed regularly. Prior to putting assessment information in the system, the following steps should be complete:

Identify the academic program and each location where more than 50% of the program's credit hours are offered (including online). Each area of the core curriculum is treated as an academic program. Separate assessments should be complete for each location.

Identify the student learning outcomes.

Identify the artifact that will assess student mastery of the learning outcome (assignment, exam, project, etc…).

Collect the assessment data (student scores on the the artifact).

Identify improvements based on the student performance data (If the learning outcomes has been assessed previously, the current assessment should build on the changes implemented as a result of the previous assessment).

Implementation

To understand how the assessment process works, please review the instructional videos below.